cant beat some good reference photos
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I bought it as soon as I saw it available in a web store
Like I said, I wanted to build one of these for years, just because of the way it looks.
That remains to be seen
Oh, that’s a nice idea too. I put that onto a Strv 103 a long time ago:
[ATTACH]465827[/ATTACH]
This is the old Accurate Armour kit, not the one by Trumpeter that was released about a month after I bought this one from AA at Euro Militaire 2002. That neatly explained why they gave me a discount on it …
There are plenty to be found of this vehicle, but they’re pretty much all of it in the Wehrtechnische Sammlung. Which is to be expected, of course
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Work has started on the JPK 120:
[ATTACH]465844[/ATTACH]
This is the lower hull minus the suspension arms and the idler wheel mountings. The parts for the hydropneumatic suspension are better than those in the Dragon KPz 70 kit (which I built some years ago), mainly in that the fit seems more solid.
The lighter grey parts are from the Hobby Boss Leopard 2A4 kit. I had originally fitted the Takom return roller mounts, but pulled them back off when I figured that using Leopard parts would make sense there too. The cones onto which the drive sprockets will fit, required some surgery: the Leopard cones have a ring moulded on that fits into a hole in the hull side, while the VT 1-2 has rings moulded onto the hull sides that its cones fit over. I had to saw and file both away to get the Leopard parts to fit on the hull side.
As I intend to have the suspension in its upper position (hull lowest to the ground), I need to adapt the idler wheel mounts to push the idler further forward, but I’m not yet sure how to best do that. Also, I need to find a way to thicken the axles so that the Hobby Boss wheels will go onto them: they’re made for axles 3 mm thick, while Takom’s are 2 mm.
Edit: forgot to add that there is a mistake in Takom’s instructions. In step 2, it says to install parts E35, E36, E37 and E38, but the numbers have been swapped around. What it calls E35 is E36 and vice versa, and the same with the other two. If you try to fit E35 where it says it needs to go, you’ll find the holes are a fraction of a millimetre too far apart; my first thought was they were too small, but drilling them bigger didn’t help. Then I noticed the part on the model seemed to be the wrong way around (E35 and E36 are each other’s mirror image, pretty much), and swapping them did allow them to fit nicely.Comment
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Very interesting build you got going on Jakko.Comment
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It’s going to get more interesting very soon
This is the front of the hull:
[ATTACH]465906[/ATTACH]
I had decided early on that the large rectangular lids need to go. In the magazine photos you can see there’s some kind of equipment behind them, but I doubt you would want lids like these in a combat vehicle’s glacis plate, and so a better place would likely be found for the stuff behind them. But filing them off is going to be quite a chore, especially if the other details are to be left alone.
Furthermore, I had the idea that the vehicle needs to have a proper commander’s hatch, Leopard-style, with all-round vision and a machine gun mount on it. But where to put that? It’s not at all clear from most sources who sits where in this vehicle, until I came across this page: commander on the left, gunner on the right and driver in the middle. I had not expected that — I figured the driver would be on the left and the commander in the middle, or perhaps on the right. But there isn’t enough room for the machine-gun skate rail around the hatch on the left side.
That same page also says that one of the main problems with the VT 1-2 was difficulty in commanding the vehicle, so I think a redesign is needed: put the commander in the middle and the driver on the left. That gave me the idea to raise the whole roof of the crew compartment to the level of the sides and commander’s hatch. This would give enough room to fit a cupola and allow it to actually see anything at all to sides other than the front.
But that, in turn, gives a problem with the various angles on the vehicle. You can’t just raise the roof, because then you end up with a vertical front plate in the middle. Soooo …
[ATTACH]465907[/ATTACH]
… it all had to come out Careful sawing and cutting got the glacis, roof plate and the sight base out without damage to the main roof or the sight base, so that I can build a new glacis and roof from plastic card (after cleaning up what’s left) and reuse the sight base for the commander.
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After cleaning up the edges of the hole I cut, I glued in the side walls for the crew compartment:
[ATTACH]465962[/ATTACH]
Note the ejector pin marks on the outsides of those side walls, which you need to fill because I suspect a fair number of them remain visible. Please mould parts like these the other way round next time, Takom?
The upper hull is still loose on the lower here, by the way. Also, don’t make the mistake I did at first, and glue the front mudguards to the lower hull when the instructions say to glue them to the side walls that form part of the upper. If you do stick them on the lower hull, you cannot fit the upper hull anymore, because it goes both over and under the mudguard on both sides. Luckily I tested the fit right after glueing the mudguards to the hull, so I could easily pull them off again.Comment
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The glacis plate is now in:
[ATTACH]466047[/ATTACH]
This is 1.5 mm plastic card, which equates to about 50 mm in real life, equivalent to the Jagdpanzer Kanone’s front armour but by the looks of it, thicker than the VT 1-2 had (which, BTW, was unarmoured).
The details are from the Takom kit, fitted where they also go on the original front plate. I only moved the step that is now near the top, from where it originally was near the bottom of the plate (where there is a vertical pencil line with a crossbar) because I felt the one in the middle was now far too low to use it to get onto the roof. I’ll add spare track links that will serve as the bottom step.
The vertical pencil lines along the sides are where the ice grousers will be fitted later.Comment
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Here is the replacement roof:
[ATTACH]466157[/ATTACH]
The round hole was the usual chore to make. I first tried using compass cutters, but that gave the normal problem of not wanting to cut a proper circle all the way through, so I there it back into the miscellaneous tools box and finished the job with a regular hobby knife, then filed it out with a semi-round file until it looks properly circular.
In the hull:
[ATTACH]466156[/ATTACH]
Also note the ice cleats from the Hobby Boss kit, with racks made from a few different widths of plastic strip.
On the inside of the roof, I had to add some plastic strip to get the Takom commander’s hatch (now driver’s hatch) at the right height and have something to glue it to:
[ATTACH]466158[/ATTACH]
Because I made the replacement roof from 0.75 mm card, but the Takom roof that I cut the hatch from is 1 mm thick, I had to glue some 0.25 mm card to the inside of the roof first, and then some thicker scrap plastic to support the kit hatch.
The guns are very nicely moulded:
[ATTACH]466159[/ATTACH][ATTACH]466160[/ATTACH]
The fume extractor is hollow all the way through so that the front and rear ends of the barrel slide into both ends of it. Fit is a little loose, though, so you would need to line everything out carefully.
However …
[ATTACH]466161[/ATTACH]
Top is a Takom barrel from the VT 1-2 kit, bottom the Hobby Boss barrel from the Leopard 2 kit. What has gone wrong here, then?
Well, nothing Looking at photos showed that early Rheinmetall 120 mm gun barrels had much thicker thermal sleeves around them than the production guns that went into the Leopard 2 and other vehicles. So both are correct. However, I will be replacing the kit parts with “production” type barrels, the one shown above and another that someone has kindly donated (but I’m still waiting for in the mail).
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Jakko,
Just caught up on your build, interesting subject and alterations.
Compass cutter.... I agree with you about them wandering off to do their own thing, and one day by mistake I started to gently scribe the marked out circle in reverse and not cut straight away. This then gave me a good guide groove for the sharp blade to then follow...
Will keep an eye on this interesting build.
Mike.Comment
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Really liking this 'what-if' idea Jakko. And of course gives you quite a bit of freedom on how to approach it, within reasonable limits of course.
It does beg one question though given your amazing attention to detail and the fact you often seem to do slightly unusual/less common builds - when was the last time up built something out of the box? Generally curious.
Keep up the great work.
ATB.
AndrewComment
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The more I look at the model, the more I see that needs removing or replacing … I hope you’ll keep finding it interesting :smiling3:
I’ll need to remember to try that next time I need to cut a circle. With this one, once I started cutting I remembered reading that some people have more luck when using the cutter in reverse, but by that time I already had a circle I had gone through with the tool the right way round a couple of times, so it didn’t want to go backwards at all.
True, though what I always do my best to avoid with models like this, is to stick things on because they look good or cool :smiling3: I have to find a justification for why it would be there rather than the original kit part. For example, in my spares boxes I found a remote-controlled machine gun from a Tamiya kit of the Schützenpanzer Marder. That is, this bit:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]n[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]n[/ATTACH]
… and my first thought, of course, was “Could I stick this on?” But even a little bit of thought said it would be a silly addition from a realism point of view. Yes, it would look cool and “what-if” but it really falls firmly into the category of what-iffy I mean, that kind of system wasn’t used on anything else at the time,* and even on the Marder itself was removed with the A1 upgrade because it must have been a complex and expensive way to give some extra firepower that probably turned out to be mostly pointless once it reached the real world.
This kind of reasoning is why I am replacing the guns, for example, because if this vehicle had really gone into production, why would it not use the exact same gun as on the Leopard 2? Even if the fume extractor would be pointless (the guns are not in the crew compartment), it wouldlikely be simpler and cheaper to manufacture and maintain one type of gun and its thermal sleeves rather than two.
* Except some MOWAG experimental vehicles and prototypes that were never adopted, either in general or in versions with a similar remote-controlled mount.
Oh, you noticed that too?
I was thinking about that too the other day … The last one I can remember offhand, where AFV models are concerned anyway, is probably the Trumpeter Rooikat that I consciously decided to build SFTB. In general, it would be 1:72 scale aircraft models that I do occasionally, and hardly ever change anything about — largely exactly because I build them for a quick change of pace.Comment
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JakkoThe more I look at the model, the more I see that needs removing or replacing … I hope you’ll keep finding it interesting :smiling3:
I’ll need to remember to try that next time I need to cut a circle. With this one, once I started cutting I remembered reading that some people have more luck when using the cutter in reverse, but by that time I already had a circle I had gone through with the tool the right way round a couple of times, so it didn’t want to go backwards at all.
True, though what I always do my best to avoid with models like this, is to stick things on because they look good or cool :smiling3: I have to find a justification for why it would be there rather than the original kit part. For example, in my spares boxes I found a remote-controlled machine gun from a Tamiya kit of the Schützenpanzer Marder. That is, this bit:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]n[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]n[/ATTACH]
… and my first thought, of course, was “Could I stick this on?” But even a little bit of thought said it would be a silly addition from a realism point of view. Yes, it would look cool and “what-if” but it really falls firmly into the category of what-iffy I mean, that kind of system wasn’t used on anything else at the time,* and even on the Marder itself was removed with the A1 upgrade because it must have been a complex and expensive way to give some extra firepower that probably turned out to be mostly pointless once it reached the real world.
This kind of reasoning is why I am replacing the guns, for example, because if this vehicle had really gone into production, why would it not use the exact same gun as on the Leopard 2? Even if the fume extractor would be pointless (the guns are not in the crew compartment), it wouldlikely be simpler and cheaper to manufacture and maintain one type of gun and its thermal sleeves rather than two.
* Except some MOWAG experimental vehicles and prototypes that were never adopted, either in general or in versions with a similar remote-controlled mount.
Oh, you noticed that too?
I was thinking about that too the other day … The last one I can remember offhand, where AFV models are concerned anyway, is probably the Trumpeter Rooikat that I consciously decided to build SFTB. In general, it would be 1:72 scale aircraft models that I do occasionally, and hardly ever change anything about — largely exactly because I build them for a quick change of pace.
Thanks very much for informative reply. Much appreciated!!
ATB.
AndrewComment
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Have to hand it to you, your research is top rate, along with your scratchery skills. Always interesting to follow .Comment
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